4/29/2015

You can’t solve problems if you don’t learn anything, and you can’t learn anything if you never admit there’s anything to learn. If there’s a problem and you want to fix it, obviously something will have to be changed, and you can’t change anything with any deliberate intent or achievement, if you don’t identify what that thing is. “There is racial and gender bias” is not a statement that provides any functionality toward these ends. Therefore, proving it is not useful in the achievement of the stated goal.

Indeed. Merely stating the problem doesn't solve the problem. Too often statement of the problem is used as an excuse for causing other problems. You also have to do the follow up, in this case ask why there is such a bias, and then offer a solution.

Notice I didn't say the solution as quite often there is more than one solution to a problem. Some solutions may solve the problem but create even bigger ones in their wake. You have to offer workable solutions that others can agree with and embrace and not solutions that will make you feel better but won't solve the problem at hand. (That's a big problem these days.)

4/26/2015

Looking at the temperatures and the type of precipitation we've seen over the past few days you'd think it was the middle of March and not the end of April. Night-time temps have been near or just below freezing and day-time temps in the 40's, though some 50's did make their appearance in the southern tier of the state.

Ice Out on Lake Winnipesaukee was announced last Friday, more than a week later than the average Ice Out date. While nowhere near the latest date (May 5th), it was still late and if it hadn't been for the high and shifting winds breaking up the ice, it easily could have been a week later than it was this year.

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This is a sad commentary.

An MRCTV reporter ventured on to the University of Maryland's campus and showed students pictures of the 40th President on the United States. Very few could identify him.

To think that college students don't know who Ronald Reagan was is disturbing on so many levels I don't know where to begin. How much of our history, and the world's history, do they not know?

To think that our nation will be in their hands some day fills me with dread, knowing they will likely fall prey to Santayana's axiom.

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“Reclaim Australia” rallies were held in 16 different locations across Australia Saturday [April 11, 2015]. Billed as a call for “patriotic Australians” to “stand together to stop tax, Sharia law and Islamization,”. the rallies provoked violent encounters with counter protesters who billed the events as racist and anti-Muslim.

Reclaim Australia, a community organization, denied the accusations. “We’re not against any particular race or any particular religion,” John Oliver, an activist with the organization, said. “We’re against the extremists of one particular religion. I know in Sydney and Melbourne they’ve got Muslims already signed on to attend because they can see what’s happening and they don’t like what’s happening.”

The group is being “mocked by the elite press and derided as racist...sort of the same way [the] Tea Party was mocked when we dared to protest government policies.”

Indeed.

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Talk about hypocrisy! And I'll bet the party involved really doesn't see it as such.

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After reading the story it seems this was less about hurt feelings than about a quick way to make a buck while imposing their own close-minded views upon their victims.

I have two words of advice for the offended lesbian couple: Grow up!

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I find it interesting that the Hollywood Leftist Elite are not upset that Bruce Jenner has talked openly about his transition from male to female. Nope. But they are “shocked and dismayed” that he came out as a Republican.

Oh, the horrors!

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Yet another Obamacare state exchange domino is about to fall, in this case Covered California.

Can anyone tell me honestly that they thought this would work when there's years of evidence proving just the opposite?

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David Starr adds his 2¢ worth to the minimum wage debate and brings up a number of points proponents are choosing to ignore.

As I've said more than once, labor is a commodity just like any other, and when it costs too much businesses won't buy as much as they might have when it cost less.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where warm temps are elusive, Ice Out has been declared, and where tons of yard work still needs to be done.

4/25/2015

The minimum wage/living wage debate continues, with many of the proponents for more than doubling the minimum wage choosing to ignore the consequences of doing so. They believe they can ignore the law of supply and demand by way of legislation, something that has been proven many times in the past to be immune from such legislation or executive order. And so it is with the present day demands for a living wage.

If all other factors remain equal, the higher the price of a good, the fewer people will demand it. That's the law of demand, a fundamental idea in economics. And yet there is no shortage of politicians, pundits, policy wonks, and members of the public who insist that raising the price of labor will not have the effect of reducing the demand for workers. In his 2014 State of the Union address, for example, President Barack Obama called on Congress to raise the national minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour. He argued that increasing the minimum wage would "grow the economy for everyone" by giving "businesses customers with more spending money."

Many of the theories put forth about how raising the minimum wage will benefit everyone tend to ignore a number of factors that will blow them out of the water. One of the first is that business owners aren't likely to adhere to the theories. They will cut costs in order to maintain their bottom lines, meaning if their labor costs double, they will likely cut staff not raise prices. That right there illustrates the first point brought up in the quote above: the higher the price of a good, the fewer people will demand it. Labor is a good. It is worth what employers are willing to pay for it. Artificially raise the price of labor and the demand for it will fall. With some businesses already having razor thin margins, doubling the price of one of their more costly aspects of business will cause one of two outcomes: they'll cut the number of employees or they'll raise prices...and go out of business.

While much of the focus of the minimum wage/living wage proponents has been big corporations like McDonald's and Walmart, it is the small businesses that will suffer the brunt of this movement should the proponents succeed. That's a huge blind spot they choose to ignore. But then again, they aren't really concerned about the small business owners because there's no press opportunities to exploit like there is when they take on the “big greedy corporations.” So the small business owners are on their own.

Another downside, something I've mentioned many times, is that such a rise in the minimum wage will lock most teens out of the labor market. Minimum wage jobs are supposed to be entry-level jobs. Raise the minimum wage to $15 and hour and almost no one will hire teens with no job experience and no work history. For those kind of wages businesses will want experienced (read that to mean more mature) employees, ones with a good work record. Unless there is a two-tiered minimum wage structure – one for teens and another for 'regular' workers - teens will be out of luck in the job market. If history is any indicator, the minimum wage/living wage proponents will have none of that as they won't see it as being 'fair', giving businesses a preference for hiring teens rather than more expensive adults for what are unskilled entry-level jobs.

The argument has been made that raising the minimum wage hasn't caused disruption in the labor market in the past, but it has, though not as broadly as will happen if it is doubled. About the only time I can recall a rise in the minimum wage having little, if any affect on jobs was when it was increased at a time when there was full employment (meaning the U3 rate was around 4% and the U6 rate around 6%) and almost no one was paying minimum wage because there was a shortage of workers. Businesses were paying above minimum wage to keep what employees they had and to 'steal' workers from other businesses. It's a perfect example of the law of supply and demand. But raise the wage at a time when there is a large supply of workers and that supply will merely grow bigger as businesses shed employees. You don't increase the demand for something by increasing its cost, particularly when the supply is already too big. An example:

The Hanson/Hawley study takes into account how wages relate to the varying cost-of-living levels among the states. First they report the number of workers in a state who earn less than $10.10 per hour. Next they apply the widely agreed upon formula that for every 10 percent increase in wages there is a corresponding 1 to 2 percent decrease in demand for labor. They then straightforwardly estimate that boosting the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour would result in the loss of between 550,000 and 1.5 million jobs.

Should the minimum wage be doubled to $15 does that mean we might see a 5 to 10 percent decrease in demand for labor? Probably. So how does that help anyone except those who are working towards creating total dependence upon government? It doesn't.

Another thing the minimum wage/living wage proponents ignore, particularly on the 'living wage' side of their argument, is the cost of living is different from state to state or region to region. An across the board increase to $15/hour will have disproportionate effects. Fifteen dollars an hour in North Carolina or Louisiana is worth more than fifteen dollars an hour in California or New York. This implies (to me) the negative effects of the living wage will fall more heavily on the lower cost-of-living states with more people losing their jobs in those states rather than the high cost states. Then again, isn't that what the proponents want – to increase the misery in low unemployment states so it's equal with high unemployment states? After all, fair is fair, right?

One more ignored consequence that can have a profound effect is labor union contracts with wage rates tied to the federal minimum wage. What happens if the living wage folks get their way and $15 an hour becomes the new minimum wage? The effects will ripple through the economy and everything will become more expensive, particularly housing, construction, and transportation costs. Those increased costs will affect other costs, like food, energy, clothing, medical care, and so on.

What about those who are presently making $15 an hour for their skilled or semi-skilled labor and they see less skilled and experienced workers now making the same as they do? Will they in turn demand much higher wages to compensate? Of course they will. That in turn will drive others above them to demand the same thing.

After it all works its way up the chain, will those at the bottom of the wage scale be any better off? No. They'll be right back where they started from and their wages won't be worth any more than they are now. They might even be worth less. Will the living wage proponents then demand yet another rise in the minimum wage and start the whole thing again? Probably. They won't have learned the lesson from the first round and will make the same mistake again, which will help nobody but will likely generate one heck of an inflation rate.

4/23/2015

Lately they have been equating speech, particularly speech they disagree with, with acts of violence, requiring the need for “safe spaces” to protect themselves from the 'violence' of someone's opinion that differs from theirs. But it doesn't stop them from threatening acts of violence against those who disagree with their morally bankrupt and ethically challenged ideology.

“The students were so carried away with the idea that I was a threat to their safety,” Sommers told the website Campus Reform, that Oberlin officials “arranged for security guards to escort me to and from the lecture to protect me from the safe spacers.”

What are these fragile leftist snowflakes going to do when they get out in the real world? Do they really think anyone is going to give a damn about “trigger warnings” or “safe spaces” or “traumatizing speech”? Hell no.

What is more likely to happen is that their employers will tell them to “Get back to work!” or “Gee, I guess that means you're FIRED!”

Oh, they'll complain about how their former place of employment was a hostile work environment, maybe file a lawsuit, and then lose when everyone at their former place of employment explains how it was the fragile snowflake who created the hostile work environment. They will curl up in a corner somewhere, semi-catatonic, unable to deal with conditions in the real world. The upside to this is that in this condition they will leave us alone and let us get on with making a living and living our lives free from the arrogance, derision, and scorn of these poor brainwashed drones.

4/21/2015

One of the “issues” Democrats appear to be focusing on for the upcoming 2016 elections is income inequality. While it sounds like something that should be addressed, I have to wonder whether it's an issue anyone can adequately deal with without yet another round of “Make the wealthy pay their fair share” or “The only way to solve poverty is to raise the minimum wage”. Both of these so-called solutions have their own problems, something that has been trivialized by Democrats in an effort to make everyone ignore the unintended consequences of those solutions.

The other issue is the self-deceptive issue of raising the minimum wage, more than doubling it, all in an effort to reduce poverty. The sell it by promoting the idea of the “living wage”, but ignore a number factors that make their solution a non-starter. I think the best way to describe it is that they want to treat the symptoms and not the cause, as if that will fix the problem. But their fixes won't have the effect they think they will and will, in fact, make things worse. Call it just another version of their 'fixes' for homeownership and college tuition, neither which had the results they promised.

Reading the numerous comments to the living wage piece in the Washington Post, it becomes evident that many of the usual suspects haven't really thought things through. They lambaste Walmart and McDonalds for paying minimum wage and providing mostly part time jobs. I know a lot of people who work for each of these corporations and with few exceptions, no one makes minimum wage at either of those places for long. If they do a good job they get pay raises. If they don't do a good job, they don't.

Walmart recently announced it is raising its starting pay rate to $9/hour. The WaPo commenters see it as a sign that Walmart has been shamed into raising their starting pay, but as one of the local Walmart managers I know has told me, it's in an effort to help keep their employees and to entice others to apply for jobs there. But of course to many that's not enough. They thing they should be getting a minimum of $15/hour. The problem is that many of the jobs at places like Walmart aren't worth that much. It is unskilled labor, period.

Another one of the arguments made for raising the minimum wage is that no one can support a family of four on minimum wage. So what? Minimum wage was never meant to do that. It was for entry level, unskilled jobs. Most of the working poor the Democrats like to use as examples are making well above minimum wage, so that argument falls flat.

One unintended consequence of raising the minimum wage to $15/hour? Teen unemployment, already too high, will skyrocket. No one in their right mind would pay that kind of money to a kid who has never had a job before when for that kind of money they can hire someone more mature and experienced. (At the farm where BeezleBub works, $15/hour can hire experienced and hard working migrant workers, each who can do two to three times the work of an inexperienced teenager. Who do you think the farm owner will hire? Hint – it won't be the inexperienced teen.)

This is an emotional issue for some Democrats. But as experience has shown, emotions cloud judgment and basing important decisions and government policies upon emotion is always a bad idea. That's because the Law of Unintended Consequences exerts itself and creates bigger problems than the one being 'solved'.

4/19/2015

We've had a respite form the wet weather over the weekend, but the rains will be moving in tomorrow and the ground around here is close to saturated with the runoff from the snow melt. I know this because much of the ground around The Manse (and around town) is still 'squishy', meaning it's waterlogged. With up to 4 inches of rain forecast for some parts of northern New England it's no wonder the National Weather Service has issued flood watches for tomorrow.

The sodden ground has limited the amount of yard work around The Manse to a bare minimum, meaning mostly trimming back some brush and pruning a few bushes. That means we'll have to squeeze in twice as much yard work next weekend, weather permitting.

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Now that Hillary's announced her run for the White House, it seems the media are reporting All Hillary, All The Time. Too bad they've decided to ignore what's really going on versus the media packaging prepared by Hillary's campaign.

The reality is nowhere near what the media is portraying.

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While the concept of DARVO – Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender – applies primarily to things like domestic and/or sexual abuse, lately it applies also to politics. Call it a variation on Alinksy's Rules for Radicals.

How many times have we seen Democrats who have been caught in some kind of wrongdoing use DARVO in an attempt to weasel out of being blamed for any of their own questionable actions?

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Sultan Knish delves into the death of the Left, primarily by its own hand. A few examples:

The West didn’t defeat Communism; it held it at bay long enough for it to defeat itself. The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China crushed Communism more decisively than Goldwater could have ever dreamed of.

The embargo didn’t turn Cuba into a hellhole whose main tourism industry is inviting progressive Canadian pedophiles to rape its children. Castro did that with help from the dead guy on the red t-shirts.

There’s no embargo to blame in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez destroyed his own Bolivarian revolution by implementing it. The Venezuelan economic collapse really took off while Obama was in the White House leafing through the tract Chavez had gifted him blaming America for all of Latin America’s troubles.

Now Chavez, the tract’s author and the Venezuelan economy are all dead.

Chavez’s successor has desperately tried to blame America for his crisis, but Uncle Sam had nothing to do with the lack of toilet paper in the stores, the milk rationing and the soldiers stationed outside electronics retailers. It’s just what happens when the left wins.

We're also seeing the same thing happening in slow motion in Argentina, where the Kirchner dynasty is doing everything it can to make sure Argentina is the next Latin American country to see its economy collapse because of leftist economic theory.

The left is like a suicide bomber or a honey bee, it can’t win. It can only kill and die. A successful leftist regime is a contradiction in terms. The hard revolutions blow up fast and then decay into prolonged misery. The soft electoral revolutions skip the explosions and cut right to the prolonged misery.

Indeed.

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Like one of the tweets stated in response to Christina Hoff Sommers tweet about her speech at the prestigious institute of higher learning, “What are they going to do when they get out of college? Stay at home so their precious ideals can’t be challenged?”

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With heavy rain on its way and a forecast for rain over the workweek, BeezleBub and I put the storage cover back on the boat. Normally I wouldn't do this, but the canvas cockpit cover didn't survive the winter, with a split right along the center seam.

I'm not upset by this turn of events as the canvas was well past its time for replacement, something scheduled for for next month. It lasted over 12 years, meaning that it owed me nothing.

Once the rains have finished I will pull the storage cover off (again) and resort to using one of my old mooring covers until the canvas is replaced.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice still covers much of the lake, open water is becoming more pronounced, and where we're still waiting for thew ground to dry out so we can finish the post-winter yard work.

4/18/2015

In the endlessly ongoing debate about Anthropogenic Global Warming, the biggest issue I and my fellow skeptics want is verifiable proof that humans are the main cause of global warming.

Do we deny that climate is changing? No, of course not. Climate has always changed and is always changing. Our biggest sticking point is that somehow all climate change is being attributed to human activity, something that is ignorant at best and arrogant at worst.

I will be more than willing to agree that AGW exists if and only if the warmist camp were able meet the three requirements laid out by Robert Tracinski. By the way, these three requirements closely align with those of the scientific method, something that has been tossed aside by the warmists in their zeal to prove their point of view is the only correct one.

A clear understanding of the temperature record.

The warmists don’t just have to show that temperatures are getting warmer, because variation is normal. That’s what makes “climate change” such an appallingly stupid euphemism. The climate is always changing.

So to demonstrate human-caused global warming, we would have to have a long-term temperature record that allows us to isolate what the normal baseline is, so we know what natural variation looks like and we can identify any un-natural, man-made effect. A big part of the problem is that we only have accurate global thermometer measurements going back 135 years—a blink of an eye on the time-scales that are relevant to determining natural variation of temperature.

A full understanding of the underlying physical mechanisms.
We have to know what physical mechanisms determine global temperatures and how they interact. The glibbest thing said by environmentalists—and proof that the person who says it has no understanding of science—is that human-caused global warming is “basic physics” because we know carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Carbon dioxide is a very weak greenhouse gas and there is no theory that claims it can cause runaway warming all on its own. The warmists’ theory requires feedback mechanisms that amplify the effect of carbon dioxide. Without that, there is no human-caused global warming. But those feedback mechanisms are dubious, unproven assumptions.

The immense, untamed complexity of the climate is reflected in the poor performance of computerized climate models, which leads us to our last major hurdle in proving the theory of global warming.

The ability to make forecasting models with a track record of accurate predictions over the very long term.

We don’t know whether current warming departs from natural variation, nor have scientists proven the underlying mechanisms by which humans could cause such an increase. But even if we did know these things, we would have to be able to forecast with reasonable accuracy how big the effect is going to be. A very small warming may not even be noticeable or may have mostly salutary effects, such as a slightly longer growing season, whereas the impact of a much larger warming is likely to cause greater disruption.

Given the abysmal record of climate forecasting, we should tell the warmists to go back and make a new set of predictions, then come back to us in 20 or 30 years and tell us how these predictions panned out. Then we’ll talk.

(Note:Some formatting was changed in the quote because I kept having problems with the word processor app I use automatically making changes I didn't want, so after 20 minutes messing around trying to get things to look the way I wanted, I gave up and reformatted. -ed.)

Much of the Catastrophic AGW forecasts are made based upon assumptions that are not backed up with experimental data or through observations out there in the real world. They are assumed to be accurate by the warmists, therefore they must be right. The climate models they've been using were wholly incapable of accurately hind-casting climate, plugging data from the past into them and seeing if the model output matches what actually happened. Not one model even came close. So how is it they can place their faith in those same models to accurately depict what the climate will be like 100 or 200 years from now?

Another thing that I find from the warmists that is difficult to take seriously is their belief that a warmer world would automatically be a bad thing. Geological and historical records imply just the opposite. The warmists assume a warmer world will have less arable land, that deserts will grow dramatically, and that everyone will die unless draconian measures are put into place. They will brook no dissent on this matter as they know it to be true, all without one shred of evidence to back up that belief.

Basing any actions upon conjecture and faith is dangerous, as history has shown us again and again. Show me the proof that what they say is accurate and true, and I will change my point of view. But I will not do so based upon the always questionable Precautionary Principle as more often than not the solution to the perceived problem is worse than the perceived problem itself.

4/15/2015

I thought it was bad enough when government meddling created the housing bubble. After reading this I realized that it's also created the higher education bubble in the same fashion as it did the housing bubble, and the aftereffects are going to be just as devastating as those seen after the housing market collapsed. It seems our politicians can't help themselves when it comes to solving a 'problem' that isn't. Too bad their help often makes things worse than if they'd left well enough alone.

Politicians seldom resist the urge to “make things better” with the money and power at their disposal. That is how we got the great housing bubble. Many politicians figured that since successful people usually own their homes, home ownership itself must be good and contrived to wreck the old lending standards so that nearly everyone could obtain a mortgage. They’ve done the same thing with higher ed, Davies and Harrigan observe: “Getting the causality backward again, government acts as if a college degree causes, rather than results from, success.”

No one ever claimed these folks were geniuses, but to think that only the result matters without making sure the process itself was sustainable shows just how ignorant our politicians have become, or worse, have always been. Homeownership or a college degree aren't the cause of success, but the effects of success. There's no shortcut around it, just as too many 'homeowners' found out once the housing bubble deflated. They found themselves in over their head, owing hundreds of thousands of dollars they had no hope of paying back and unable to sell their too-expensive-to-pay-for homes at any price because the buyers and mortgage lenders disappeared.

The same can be said of college education, where money was readily available through student loans. The large supply of money drove college tuition and other related costs through the roof, rising at many times the rate of inflation. The problem is that many students wasted their time and borrowed money on courses of study that had little hope of preparing them for life out in the real world. The were handed their sheepskins, assuming the graduated at all, and then found they were only qualified for jobs they could have had right out of high school. There are a lot of barristas and pizza delivery guys out there with expensive Bachelors Degrees in the Liberal Arts that are having a hard time paying off their student loans. Some of those loans total almost as much as some home mortgages and cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, so these folks will be working low paying jobs for 30 years to pay off the money they borrowed for their useless degrees.

All of this thanks to the clueless government folks in Washington who have absolutely no grasp on the concept of cause and effect.

4/12/2015

Yard work has started here at The Manse, mainly cutting back some of the brush (primarily sumac, a rather pernicious 'weed' that chokes out a lot of the other growth). Beyond that there's little else we can do because much of the ground is still covered with snow and the rest is too wet.

We thought of taking the winter cover off of the boat and using just a tarp for the next few weeks. That allows us to move it to the local boat shop for some maintenance and a few repairs. Of course it's going to be some time before the lake will be open for boating as it's still covered shore to shore with ice.

The garage has been cleaned up and things rearranged including restacking the last of the firewood to one side, draining the last of the gas from the snowblower's gas tank and moving it to the rear of the garage, storing the snowshovels and roof rake away, moving the lawnmower towards the front of the garage, storing the now empty sand buckets, and sweeping out last of the water, mud, dirt, and other detritus.

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The Air Force general who warned that anyone speaking favorably of the A-10 Warthog could be considered to have committed treason has been removed from office.

That some of the Air Force brass would like to see the A-10 removed from service has created a divisive atmosphere, in particular with those who see the move as disastrous.

As I have written many times, the A-10 is the most successful and deadliest close air support aircraft in history. Ask any Army or Marine combat veteran about the A-10 and you'll get an earful about how effective it is. No other aircraft in the US arsenal has the capabilities of the A-10 or the survivability in a hostile combat environment. That the Air Force wants to do away with it has a lot of ground pounders spitting mad, knowing its retirement could mean more of them will die without the air support only it can provide.

If the Air Force doesn't want it, then perhaps they should give it to the Army or the Marines, or both, and the Key West Agreement be damned. You don't retire the most effective weapons platform ever seen without having and equally or more effective one to replace it. While the Air Force has been pushing the F-35 as a replacement, anyone paying attention knows it wouldn't survive under the conditions the A-10 brushes off with impunity, nor will it have the capabilities of the A-10.

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As one who has had extensive air travel experience, I can tell you this idiot the Food Babe got just about everything wrong in regards to the conditions inside of an airliner cabin. She obviously knows nothing about cabin pressurization (honey, it's not like deep sea diving), the dryness of the air (she states the air inside the cabin is drier than that in the Sahara, but she has it exactly backwards), and she has no idea exactly where the air in the cabin actually comes from (she takes a stab at it but gets it wrong), and that's just for starters.

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Some folks never learn what history teaches, making the same mistakes over and over.

Apparently he isn't old enough to remember when energy (electricity, natural gas, petrol) in Great Britain was nationalized (pre-Thatcher) and the costs of energy were high and the reliability of the energy supplies were questionable. But he wants to go back to those days thought he doesn't realize it...or he does and sees it as a feature and not a bug. In either case he's not going to get his way because no one wants to go back to the bad old days.

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The warmists keep using the oft cited and thoroughly discredited climate models as the basis for their claims that we're all going to die unless we “DO SOMETHING!” right now. That 'something' is always draconian in nature and requires the sacrifice by everyone...except them, of course.

As I have stated more than once, I use computer models in my work and as good as they are, they aren't perfect. While using a small number of well understood parameters to model electronic circuit performance, the computer models merely give me a close approximation of how the circuit will perform. It isn't perfect because there are some parameters that cannot be modeled because we don't know what they are, such as stray capacitances or inductances, mutual couplings between adjacent elements, etc. It is only once I build the circuit and test it that I will know how it will actually perform.

Now picture a climate model that uses thousands of parameters, many of which are not well understood, and ignore thousands more of which there is little or no understanding. Compare what the model says to actual data, then ignore the fact that the data doesn't even come close to matching the model, but use the model results to 'predict' what will happen 100 or 200 years from now. That's not science. It's a fortuneteller using a computerized crystal ball, one with a buggy and defective program, to tell you what your still unborn great grandchildren will do for a living even though it couldn't tell you what your children are doing at the moment.

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First, let's hear from him about what's driving him to do these studies.

It is easy enough to find critical analysis on conservative websites of why liberals act the way they do. Some articles are simply wrong. Some seem to attempt that mind-reading of others' motives I so heartily dislike. Then there are some which are extremely negative, so that any liberal reading it would be deeply offended for himself and for his friends, and reject out of hand – and yet contain considerable truth. I can read some of those splenetic screeds yet still say I know people like that. I know people just like that. Even more, I can read the writings and observe the behaviors of a great many public liberals and see these worst characteristics covered by only the thinnest disguises. In that latter group, this is the majority. How do smart folks fall for this?

Yet most of the liberals I know are darn nice people. I can see the enabling of evil in what they think and what they say, and sometimes a type of evil peeks out from them as well. But that would hardly be untrue of conservatives or libertarians also, would it? Enabling evil and evil peeking out are the human condition.

AVI wants comments, but no theories. He'll create his own hypothesis when he has enough input.

Be aware that he won't be doing this just for liberals, but conservatives will also be the subject of a follow-on study.

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So Hillary is going to announce her run for the Democrat nomination for President.

Big deal.

She has too much blood on her hands and a disregard for the law, something she has amply displayed over the past 20 years or so, to be President. People seem to die around her because of her actions/in-actions. Vince Foster was merely the first (that we know about).

Frankly, I think she's just too damn lazy to be president, much like the present occupant of the Oval Office. She likes the perks but isn't willing to do the work required to earn them. Certainly her record as Secretary of State and as a Senator shows that.

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This amply illustrates the insanity that is federal government bureaucracy and its negative effect on a parched California. Four billion gallons is a lot of water. If they need to make sure those 29 fish make it to the Pacific, wouldn't it be more prudent and cheaper to catch them, put them in a tank on a truck, and release them further downstream closer to the Pacific Ocean than waste all of that water to get them there? Then again, common sense is not something any government bureaucracy possesses in any amount.

At least the director of the South San Joaquin Irrigation District has some sense, telling the unidentified federal agency “no” and retaining legal counsel to head off any legal actions. As the director stated, “This water is better used on human interests, like agriculture and homes.”

4/11/2015

I like the way this particular post begins, with a quote from Star Trek – The Next Generation. It is something all those who teach and study science should memorize, and something all scientists should remember.

Science, whether teaching it or performing it, should be driven by one particular directive: Search for the truth.

Notice I did not capitalize 'truth', as 'Truth' is something entirely subjective and is far too often driven by political or ideological beliefs. Lower-case truth is something that can be measured, proven again and again by others, and is not changeable depending upon the aforementioned politics or ideology. It can be ignored, it can be buried by innuendo, or decried by those whose political beliefs or ideologies won't allow them to believe it because it will weaken their positions in society.

In science, if the facts change so should any conclusions drawn from them. But that has been short-circuited on an increasingly frequent basis because the facts don't fit in with the narrative du jour of one group or another, and therefore must be discredited or dismissed out of hand. Call it modern day Lysenkoism.

If you at all love science — and I mean really love it — you’ll understand immediately that science is two things, simultaneously:

1. A process by which knowledge is acquired, assembled and synthesized about the world, and

2. The sum total of all that knowledge, and the best conclusions we can reach based on it.

Although it’s slow, and full of missteps, blind alleys and spurious results, science is the process that drives the human enterprise forward.

This is something that has been forgotten by a lot of people, particularly many so-called climate scientists who are neither scientists or in any way qualified to demand draconian actions to solve a climate 'crisis' that shows no signs of being a crisis. (As Glenn Reynolds has stated many times, “I'll start believing it's a crisis when the folks calling it that start acting like it's a crisis.”)

This problem extends itself into a lot of other areas, too, like the many claims about the evils of GMO's, the validity of the much hated Renewable Fuels Mandate, and the pseudo-scientific blather about a link between vaccines and autism, just to name a few.

Science is for everyone, and anyone can learn about it, talk about it, or even teach it to another.

But before you tell that story to the world, make sure you’re getting it right. The opposite of knowledge isn’t ignorance, but rather misinformation posing as knowledge.

Too often the “misinformation posing as knowledge” is deliberate, a means of pushing an agenda that most folks would see as harmful, deceptive, and self-serving under normal circumstances. But once it is wrapped in the mantle of some kind of scientific 'principle', it's used as a bludgeon to force the people to do things they otherwise wouldn't do of their own free will, all under the guise of 'saving this, that, and the other thing'. It isn't science, it's propaganda and should be devoutly ignored. The only response to such things should be “Sod off, Swampy!”

The problem is that too many people can't tell the difference between real science and pseudo-science/junk science. And there lies the problem. It is now what drives many of our policies, from energy, air and water pollution, agriculture, medicine, and a whole list of things that affect our everyday lives. As such, it can mean government at all levels will make the wrong decisions about a wide range of issues based upon misinformation and rumor masquerading as science. They will ignore the true problems and waste time, money, and lives upon problems that are, at best, minor if they are problems at all.

4/10/2015

The overblown and grossly inaccurate campus rape “crisis” is creating havoc across the nation, with colleges implementing kangaroo courts at the behest of a government agency that has no such authority to make such requirements. That it is likely to cost colleges millions in damages due to lawsuits by students 'convicted' by incompetent tribunals incapable of conducting what are in fact criminal investigations of “he-said/she-said” cases is something the overwrought Social Justice Warriors care nothing about. It's all about 'justice' even though their definition of justice seems to be suspiciously close to that of lynching. It's all just another version of a witch hunt.

We've seen these before over the past 2,000 years or so. We've seen them writ large here in the US just in the past few decades. The 'satanist' inspired music that was supposedly driving teens to commit suicide in the 70's and the ludicrous charges of child sexual abuse against daycare workers (with some also being connected with satanist rituals) without a single jot of evidence and wildly outlandish 'testimony' of the supposed victims putting a lot of innocent people in prison being just two prime examples of modern day witch hunts.

The criminal cases brought against those accused of carrying out theatrical episodes of ritualized sexual abuse within the walls of American daycares look absolutely unbelievable in retrospect. The phenomenon of “recovered memories” that drove many of these cases is pseudoscientific poppycock, and the details of the abuse suffered by the children in these cases is obviously the result of adult anxiety filtered through the juvenile mind: Little girls insisted, for example, that they had been sexually violated with butchers’ knives, while others told of being buried alive, being flushed down toilets, etc. There was no physical evidence that any of this happened, of course — and even in the happy era before toilet capacity became a federal obsession, flushing an entire child down the commode was a physical impossibility — but that did not seem to matter very much. The nation was convinced — not in its mind, but in its always-unreliable heart — that there were monsters afoot, that somebody, somewhere, was doing terrible things to our teenagers and children. The parents of that paranoid time were, of course, absolutely right: Somebody was doing something terrible to the children.

It was them.

The facts don't matter. Evidence doesn't matter. Only the accusation matters, particularly if it serves the narrative du jour. And so it is with this latest manufactured crisis, the so-called “rape culture” that exists nowhere and that no one can seem to prove, particularly with actual crime statistics. It doesn't help that rape is being so loosely defined on campuses that just about any interaction between male and female students can be defined as rape, particularly if one squints and turns their head to one side.

Somebody is doing something terrible to the children young women on campus. That somebody is they themselves and the SJW's who don't give a damn about real justice. They are leaving a trail of victims in their wake, but it doesn't matter to them because, after all, they're just men and everyone knows they're all rapists, right?

Man-made climate change happens. Man-made climate change kills a lot of people. It’s going to kill a lot more. We have laws on the books to punish anyone whose lies contribute to people’s deaths. It’s time to punish the climate-change liars.

Then that's almost always the response by the radical Left to people who refuse to knuckle under to their close-minded, morally bankrupt, and ethically challenged ideology. Don't even try to reason with them because, as as been shown many times over the past 100 years or so, one cannot reason with those who have no ability to do so. One might as well talk to a robot, which is exactly what they are – programmed drones incapable of independent thought. Don't confuse them with data or facts because they do not fit in with their narrative. They 'know' they are right and are willing to do anything to prove they are right even if all the evidence says otherwise. And so it is with the always controversial topic of climate change.

Dr. Sallie Luise Bailunas gave a talk about “weather cooking”, a phenomenon of the 1500's and 1600's that 'explained' the extreme weather of the Little Ice Age as being caused by witches and sorcerors. The call rose up from the 'learned' elite to eliminate the threat.

Does it sound familiar? If not, compare what Dr. Bailunas lectured about and the call by Adam Weinstein and Lawrence Torcello. It sounds like Weinstein and Torcello would have been right at home back in the 17th century, doesn't it?

4/05/2015

After the warm temps in the 60's we experienced on Friday, colder temps more reminiscent of early March have returned. It was in the 30's with wind chills in the teens yesterday and a little warmer with a bit less wind today.

The colder temps meant I had to fire up the Official Weekend Pundit Woodstove. Normally by this time of year we heat with the propane furnace because it is usually needed only in the evening and first thing in the morning to take the chill off. It looks like we'll be using the woodstove the rest of this week as night time temps will be in the 20's and daytime temps will be 15 to 20 degrees below normal.

I'm just waiting for Al Gore to tell me it's all the fault of Global Warming.

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Speaking of Global Warming, I caught a report on ABC's Good Morning America this morning dealing with California's water problems, including a clip of Governor Jerry Brown announcing the statewide water restrictions. Ironic, considering a lot of the blame can be laid on Brown for killing water projects in the 70's that would have helped mitigate the present day problems.

Too many people forget that southern and parts of central California are basically arid/semi-arid climes that have been changed through the use of water from elsewhere in California and from other states. Now that the regular drought cycle has gone into the dry phase, water supplies are drying up because the snowpack on the various mountain ranges is all but gone and rainfall totals are well below the amounts needed to help fill reservoirs and restore aquifers.

Some are laying blame on AGW, but paleoclimatologists and geologists are calling “Bulls**t!” on the claim, saying these kinds of droughts are a regular thing and that the past 100 years in California were uncharacteristically wet. Now that the weather is returning to historic patterns it's all of a sudden the fault of AGW.

There are plenty of object lessons out there showing how raising the minimum wage, particularly to unreasonable levels, have just the opposite effect, destroying jobs and businesses. We're seeing that in Seattle and San Francisco, where both cities raised their minimum wages well above the federal level. In Seattle a number of businesses, primarily restaurants, are closing their doors because the wage increases have turned them from being profitable into losing money, something that isn't sustainable. Others are packing up and moving to more business friendly climes.

Of course I expect none of that will dissuade other cities and states from making the same mistake and watching unemployment go up and business growth stop, or even reverse. I also expect some businesses, like the franchise restaurants (McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, etc.) will replace some of their workers with ordering kiosks as they're cheaper in the long run. (No benefits, no wage increases, they don't call out from work, and don't complain about their hours.)

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State budget battles are always contentious, and so it is with my home state of New Hampshire.

The Governor's proposed budget was a bust from the beginning, increasing spending well above the revenue estimates that would have required raising or adding new taxes (again). Many of the towns and cities have level -unded for their coming fiscal year and I think they expected the same thing from the state. But instead the governor went on a spending spree.

The legislature wasn't buying it, and made a number of cuts to the proposed budget. (Here I must remind you that the proponents of expanded state spending have called the lower increase in spending 'budget cuts', their usual tactics and wholly misleading.)

Yes, the legislature did make some actual spending cuts compared to the previous biennial budget, but I think they had to start somewhere. Now that the House has passed its version of the budget, it's time for the state Senate to propose changes.

In the end I think they'll work it out, providing the needed funding while keeping spending in check, but it's going to be a long drawn out process. If nothing else it will be interesting to watch the give and take.

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Oh, no!

It appears one fragile snowflake at Harvard thinks the university's “safe space” for its totally unprepared-for-real-life students isn't safe enough.

I wonder how traumatic it will be for these cloistered students once they're exposed to the real world?

I expect the billable hours for therapists are going to skyrocket once these folks leave university.

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It appears the hate piled upon Memories Pizza has backfired upon the oh-so-tolerant Left, with donations to the media-ambushed Indiana pizza restaurant near $1 million.

The faux controversy has ended up focusing more attention on the LGBT community for it's intolerance of those who do not wholeheartedly agree with their agenda. They seem to have forgotten that tolerance runs in both directions, or worse, they really don't care. (Of the two, I'd say it's more likely it's the latter.)

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So why is Walmart so reviled by progressives when its profits (and prices) are so low that it might earn a “profit day” every 31 days, and its main corporate objective is to provide low-cost merchandise to America’s low- and middle-income households? Every day that a Walmart opens its doors for business, it gives everybody in that local community a raise and makes them better off. On the other hand, why do progressives worship Apple so religiously when its extremely pricey products generate such huge profit margins (more than 7 “profit days” every month) that the company’s stock is worth almost as much as the entire Brazilian stock market? Every day that an Apple store opens for business, it stands ready to extract $24.20 in profits for every $100 spent that day, which seems like a huge transfer of wealth from Apple’s loyal customers to Apple’s wealthy shareholders. And yet the progressives worship Apple and revile Walmart – go figure?!

What makes this hatred of Walmart even more ridiculous? Walmart's employees are far more diverse than Apple's, with “twice as many women and more than twice as many blacks as a share of its workforce than does Apple.”

The answer is the one I gave above: hypocrisy.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where a strong sun and strong winds clash, boat covers have been coming off, and where the mud deepens with every day.

4/04/2015

The search for sustainable fusion as a power source continues though it appears it may be 20 years away...just as it has been for the past 60 years. While the NIF (National Ignition Facility) which uses UV lasers, and the ITER project, which uses a tokamak design, are still making small strides in generating as sustainable fusion reaction with a net energy gain, they aren't there yet.

There are a number of other fusion projects around the world trying to achieve the same goal. Of all of them, only two of these other projects appear (to me) to have a chance of success. Ironically, both of them are low budget approaches compared to the billions spent on the NIF and ITER projects. And of those two, one has had a number of successful research prototypes, that being polywell fusion. The other, a reactor design by Lockheed Martin, won't see any tests on its fusion reactor until 2017 at the earliest.

Polywell fusion, also called Electrostatic Confinement fusion, was first theorized by Harold Grad and followed up by the late physicist Robert Bussard. (This is something I've covered before, here, here and here.)

Polywell fusion has received funding in the low/mid-double-digit millions while NIF and ITER have received billions, yet it appears polywell fusion has made greater strides. With each series of prototypes and tests, the so-called “Wiffle Ball” reactors (named that because the reactor core resembles a wiffle ball) have proven out Bussard's math and predictions.

What I find ironic is that should polywell or any of the other fusion projects achieve their goals and fusion power becomes a reality, the lunatic fringe “greens” will fight tooth and nail to keep it from ever being turned into a commercially viable technology. Writes one commenter to the WUWT piece:

If a viable, commercial nuclear fusion plant was built today Greens would oppose it to their core. They will create imaginary dangers and attempt to deceive.

Oh look what I see! They started even before one is built! It’s worse than I thought!

He then goes on to link to a number statements from Greenpeace that amply illustrates their total ignorance about how fusion works and the inherent risks which are a small fraction of that of fission plants.

The lunatic greens also have a general hatred of technology as shown by this quote from Jeremy Rifkin of the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation, who said “The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.” Yeah, like this guy has any understanding of what virtually unlimited energy could do to save ecosystem. All he can see is that anything new automatically equates to “bad”.

Then you have incredibly pessimistic comments from someone like doom-sayer Dr. Paul Erlich who stated “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” This from a man who made a number of apocryphal predictions, none of which came to pass. It just shows us how much of a misanthrope he is. (According to him we should have starved to death, frozen to death, burned to death, or died of thirst by now.)

Therefore, I think it's safe to ignore Rifkin, Erlich, and all of the other “We're all DOOMED!” lunatics.

Should fusion power come to fruition and do so at a reasonable cost, the possibilities of what it can do are limited only by our imaginations and our willingness to do the work to make it so. Let's hope they succeed.